Ad response tests show how attention connects to memory
Admap, Charles E. Young
November 2009
Much of current neuroscientific ad research is focused on understanding the short term effects of engagement with advertising and media, but ignores the longer term processes involved in building brand memories. This article presents some research showing the connection between two measures of attention, using brain waves and picture sorts, and the long term memories of commercial imagery that linger after the commercials have stopped airing.
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Ad Tracking Brochure
Learn why recognition is a superior measure of advertising awareness in the marketplace, and the compelling reason to do ad tracking online. Optimize your media plan by testing a spectrum of commercials in a campaign pool, determining which are strong, which are weak, and calculating the cost-efficiency of each execution. Learn how to directly measure commercial wear-out, without a theoretical model. Discover why the Ameritest Flow of Attention adds a critical step, making the measurement of advertising awareness more accurate than ever before.
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Advertising Age, Letters to the editor: Agencies should be more involved with Researchers
Advertising Age, Charles E. Young
May 9, 2005
This piece challenges conventional research wisdom and addresses the role of negative emotions in advertising effectiveness.
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The Advertising Research Handbook--Second Edition!
The Advertising Research Handbook, Charles E. Young
October, 2008
"Whether you are a beginner or a veteran, this Handbook will help you become an expert. This useful and insightful book explains how advertising works and how to do research to tell in advance whether yours will work."
--Dr. "Bob" Bailey, BBDO Advertising

** Get your copy of the book by clicking on the Contact link (above right) and sending us an email.**
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Aesthetic Emotion and Long-Term Ad Effects
Admap, Charles E. Young
April, 2006
There is a lot of debate about the proper role of emotion in advertising effectiveness. This paper suggests that this debate is something of a red herring. This innovative research study of the advertising for a major brand from one of the world's largest packaged goods companies shows that the hardest working parts of a television commercial are those moments when the audience's thoughts and emotions come together.
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Ameritest FAQ
In this 18 page document of frequently asked questions, we cover the following items: Research procedure, questionnaire design, the report, using the information, theory, time line, pricing, and contact information for Ameritest.
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Birthplace of a Brand
Ameritest, Charles E. Young
In just ten days, one video distributed on YouTube gained more viewings than any other online video had in two years. Susan Boyle, an unknown 47 year-old private citizen from a no-name-village in Scotland, was catapulted into total worldwide fame in just over a week. Why did so many people watch this video and pass it on? Find out, through Ameritest’s three dimensional analysis of the Susan Boyle video. Discover the real power in understanding the syntax of moving film and learn how to embed real branding moments and create long-term brand equity via visual communication.
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Brain Waves, Picture Sorts®, and Branding Moments
Journal of Advertising Research, Chuck Young
July/August 2002
This paper describes a method to identify potential branding moments in television commercials. It involves the convergence between two fundamentally different nonverbal moment-by-moment measurement techniques. The first is a picture-sorting technique. The second is a brain-wave measurement.
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Brand Linkage and Advertising that Builds Brands
Charles E. Young
This 16 page article on Brand Linkage covers: What is Brand Linkage? Why is Brand Linkage Important? How does Ameritest Measure Brand Linkage? The film, copy and music elements of an advertisement or What is the key to visual communication? Fitting and growing the brand and developing ownable brand equities. Semantic vs. esthetic information. Recognition vs. recall measurements.
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Call the Right Play
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
April 2008
Four different theories on when to introduce a brand in a TV ad are explored, including examples of the best situations in which to use each approach and each one's strengths and weaknesses.
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Capturing the Flow of Emotion in TV ads, a new approach
The Journal of Advertising Research, Charles E. Young
June 2004, Volume 44, NO. 2
This paper addresses the problem of how to measure the emotional content of television commercials. A new measurement approach is described which is based on a moment-by-moment picture-sorting technique (Ameritest's Flow of Emotion®). This approach is shown to complement a picture-sorting technique which has previously been presented in this journal as a powerful diagnostic tool for explaining day-after recall (i.e., Ameritest's Flow of Attention®). Results based on an analysis of 120 commercials from packaged goods categories show how this new emotion flow measure is a strong predictor of purchase intent, but not attention or recall. Conversely, the attention flow measure explains commercial attention-getting power, as well as recall, but not purchase intent.
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Case study: BMW Movies--luxury car to movie star
Admap, Charles E. Young and Amy Shea
April 2007
One new genre of advertising that has emerged, known as branded entertainment, attempts to integrate products into entertainment films. But do these films actually work as advertising? This paper presents the now-legendary BMW Internet Movies as a case study that illustrates how an understanding of story and its controlling idea is at the core of making successful branded entertainment.
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Close the Sale: Effective Package Design
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E.Young
January 2009
There is an old saying among marketers that "The package is the last
ad the consumer sees before she buys the product!" As a corollary,
it should be added that the package is the most important ad the consumer sees before she buys the product. This article explores the three reasons why this is true.
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Creative Awards vs. Copytesting
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles Young and Larry Cohen
April 2004, Volume XVIII Number 4
What does the fact that an ad won a major award show tell us about how that ad is likely to perform in research tests among consumers? And, as a corollary, what is it not telling us that may be critical to understanding the true potential of the ad to generate sales in the marketplace?
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Co-creativity
Admap, Charles E. Young
January 2008
This paper explains how cognitive science sheds light on emotional responses to advertising.
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Creative Differences between Copywriters and Art Directors
Journal of Advertising Research, Charles E. Young
May/June 2000, Volume 40., No. 3
This paper reports findings from a telephone study conducted among agency art directors and copywriters about their attitudes and beliefs about television commercials. The study finds significant differences between these two groups. The results of this study suggest the need for more balanced methods of advertising measurement which can give full weight to the visual power of television advertising.
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Delivering The Message
Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, Chuck Young
November 2004
This article was published in the November edition of the Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan. Chuck Young discusses the importance of going beyond verbally derived advertising research measures. In a culture like Japan, where a large proportion of communication is non-verbal, this is especially important.
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Does day-after recall testing produce vanilla advertising?
AdMap, Chuck Young, John Kastenholz and Graham Kerr
June 2004
This paper demonstrates why Recall lacks the ability to effectively measure emotional advertising. Insights into these different performance measures and correlations with other diagnostics are demonstrated.
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Emotion in TV Ads
Admap, Charles E. Young and John Kastenholz
January 2004
Good storytelling, which unites ideas with emotions, lies at the heart of advertising effectiveness. In our pre-testing work, we have identified four types of emotional organization or dramatic structures which, in general, are found in effective commercials.
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The Eye is Not a Camera
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
March 2003
It's a simple memory test that reminds us that the human mind stores memories in more than one way. For advertising researchers, it triggers the debate about the relative merits of recognition vs. recall as a measure of advertising awareness. It is sometimes higher by as much as a factor of two! Which measure should you believe?
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Fast Editing Speed and Commercial Performance
Admap, Charle E. Young
May 2007
Quick cutting enhances attention and engages the audience, to the benefit of the brand.
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Fast-working Advertising
Admap, Charles E. Young
June 2007
Like a good movie, good commercials distort the audience's sense of time. Good ads seem to work faster in the brain. Effective advertising is fast-working advertising. This paper explains why.
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A Film Director's Guide to Ad Effectiveness
Admap, Charles E. Young
Sept. 2003
Understanding the contribution of the filmmaker's art to advertising effectiveness. An audience doesn't just watch a movie. An audience participates in a movie by choosing to focus more on some things than on other things in the film. Taking this visual "language" from the film to probe an audience's participation in the film can provide very powerful insights into how commercials connect with the mind and heart of consumers.
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Finding Ideas That Travel: Effective Global Brand Advertising
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
November 2003
Advertising that is developed in country may have a home-court advantage in terms of how it scores on measures of performance. The challenge of managing international advertising is to make the correct trade-offs between in-country efficiency versus cross-country efficiency.
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Finding The Creative Edge
Admap, Charles E. Young
December 2006
Ameritest shows how the concept of "flow" is reflected in good creative research.
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Five Strategies for Improving Advertising Productivity
Charles E. Young
Advertising is the business process by which ordinary products are made famous and turned into stars. However, according to the laws of statistics, 40% of the ads that you test will score only average. Of course, no business wants to spend money on average advertising. How do you manage this unpredictable process to beat the averages? This article outlines five different learning strategies to repeatedly achieve productivity gains in advertising performance: (1) test the advertising creative with a valid performance standard, (2) rehearse the creative in rough form first, (3) experiment with creative alternatives, (4) optimize the creative with diagnostic insights, and (5) learn from the competition.
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Focus and Fit: Advertising and branding join forces to create a star.
Marketing Research Magazine, Charles E. Young, John Kastenholz, and Graham Kerr
Spring 2004
What is the role of the brand in the little movie that is a television commercial? Is it the star of the movie, driving the plot forward and occupying the center spotlight of consumer thoughts whether on screen or off? Or is it a supporting actor, carrying a scene or two in the service of the action, providing essential information to make the story more interesting and relevant for the audience? Or is it merely an extra playing a bit part in the movie? Or perhaps it is more like a producer, only appearing in the credits at the end of the film?

This paper examines how the construct of branding has been measured by three major pre-testing systems--Ipsos-ASI, Millward Brown's Preview, and Ameritest--for a large number of commercials produced by Unilever.
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Here's Looking At You
Charles E. Young and Amy Shea
Agency creative are skeptical of advertising pretesting. Their assumption is that the aesthetic judgment of an experience creative director cannot be validated with audience research data. We put this assumption to the test by looking in detail the way a master storyteller, Robert McKee, author of the book Story, analyzes a Hollywood classic movie, Casablanca and comparing it with the moment-by-moment emotional engagement metrics produced by the online Ameritest pre-testing system.
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High Touch vs High-Tech: Can you test print ads on the internet?
Qurik's marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
March 2002
The internet beckons advertising researchers with the promise of a cheaper and faster way of putting advertising--as research stimulus--in front of the eyeballs of consumers. But what happens to the validity of the research when the tactile experience of reading an ad in the context of a physical magazine is transported to cyberspace?
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How Consumer React to New-Product Ads
Journal of Advertising Research, Charles Young, David Olson, Mary Jane Schlinger
June/July 1982 Vol. 22, No. 3
Why do people react differently to commercials for new brands versus those for mature, ongoing brands? The reason for undertaking the research was to identify differences that would offer clues to developing more effective new-product advertising--both in terms of strategy and execution.
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How to Measure Creative Performance in a Fast-Paced World of Advertising
White Paper, Charles E.Young
This paper introduces a new approach to advertising tracking, which provides real-time performance rankings plus diagnostic reasons why for all the advertising creative running in a category. The paper shows how knowledge of the strength and weaknesses of your competitor's advertising is important for explaining the impact of your own advertising on your brands sales. For validation, the paper describes a simple advertising model of McDonald's sales results, based on public sales figures.
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Learn the Visual Language of Successful Global Brands
Admap, Charles E. Young
June 2009
What is one of the biggest barriers to building a global brand? The limitations of language. However, there is a solution and it lies in understanding how consumers around the world cognitively process and respond to visuals.
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Making deposits in consumer memory banks
Charles E. Young
Scientists now know that their are multiple memory systems in the brain--which was the problem with traditional measures of memory such as day-after-recall, which accessed only one of these memory systems. This paper describes three distinct memory systems that are important for understanding advertising. Using examples from a large database of fast food commercials,this paper presents a simple method of "visual accounting" that shows how advertisers can keep track of the different types of memories that are being created by individual ads so that an entire ad campaign can be kept in balance as it works to build a holistic brand presence in the mind.
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Making Connections
Charles E. Young
Persuasive advertising is advertising that either reinforces or adds new connections to the ideas and images that consumers associate with your brand. This paper demonstrates that ads that are better "glued together" in the minds of consumers tend to be more persuasive; conversely, ads that have a break or discontinuity in the flow of consumer attention through the ad tend to be less persuasive.
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Minding Music and Movies
Admap, Charles E. Young
May 2008
Ameritest shows how music and visuals interact to structure attention to ads and improve their effectiveness.
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Multi-Platforming Engagement: An MTV Case History
Admap, Charles E. Young and Amy Shea
October 2007
Charles Young and Amy Shea of Ameritest show how audience engagement with programming affects engagement with the ads.
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New Product Launch: L'eggs (Sara Lee)
White Paper, Charles E. Young
A David Ogilvy Silver Medallion Winner
How Ameritest helped the L'eggs campaign take off successfully. It outlines the importance of Brand Place and points out how the separation between "frontstage" and "backstage" has to be properly maintained to create dramatic effect.
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One Size Almost Fits All: Integrated Testing for Integrated Campaigns
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charle E. Young
April 2006
Ameritest shows you how to integrate your research measurements across different media platforms by systematically building a coherent set of measurement models (TV, radio, print, outdoor, direct response, package design and internet advertising.)
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One Size Fits All: A global model for diagnostic pre-testing of TV commercials
ESOMAR Rome Conference 2001 CD, Charles E. Young
2001
This paper describes the international validation of a heuristic model for pre-testing TV commercials. The validation is based on the model's internal measures rather than external comparisons such as pre-and post-test validations.
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Pick Your Peaks: Online Ad Tracking
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charle E. Young
July/August 2005
As more advertisers move their ad tracking research to the internet, a common technique is to use a few frames from a TV commercial to obtain a recognition-based advertising awareness score. But Ameritest has shown repeatedly that not all the images in a commercial are equally well recalled. This research shows the danger inherent in choosing the wrong images for the advertising stimulus. If you get it wrong you can understand you're true ad awareness by up to forty percent! Testing TV ads on the Internet.
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Picture Sorts® vs. Emotion Trace:
White Paper, Charles E. Young
Both Ameritest and Millward Brown have developed moment-by-moment techniques for measuring emotional engagement with television commercials. This short paper compares the two approaches.
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Prescription for Testing Multi-Page Print Ads Online
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
January 2005
Monitoring the health of prescription drug advertising can be challenging for a variety of reasons. Finding the target audience--doctors with sometimes rare specialties--can be expensive and time-consuming. The message content of the advertising can be complex, often requiring multiple pages of explanation and proofs of performance. And powerful research diagnostic instruments, which are essential for pinpointing areas of an ad that require creative treatment, are critical. For all these reasons, testing multi-page drug advertising on the Internet would appear to be contraindicated. Ameritest has found an ?online cure? for these ills that is cheaper and quicker than the equivalent offline approach, applies to multi-page ads, and provides diagnostic insights on how viewers process print ads without using cumbersome and expensive eye-tracking equipment.
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Print Brochure
Ameritest Print Ad Research Brochure. Print advertising research should be based on how the mind moves through the ad, not the eye.
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Reach Out and Touch Someone
Charles E. Young
These days every marketer things in terms of the various "touch-points" of the brand in terms of how they must communicate with the consumer. What few understand is the important contribution that having someone actually touch the brand in a commercial can make to overall ad effectiveness. This paper uses some of oldest and newest findings from neuroscience research to explain why touch is such an important component of communication.
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The Relation Between Brand Name Linguistic Characteristics and Brand Name Memory
The Journal of Advertising, Tina M. Lowrey, L. J. Shrum and Tony M. Dubitsky
Fall 2003 Vol 32 No 3
Copytesting results were used to assess the relationship between linguistic features in brand names and memory for those names. Regression analyses revealed that three linguistic variables were positively related to brand name memory but only for less familiar brands.
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Researcher as Teacher: A heuristic model for pre-testing TV commercials
Quirks Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
March 2001
A researcher has two jobs: first, to learn something useful that your clients didn't know before; second, to teach them what you found out. The second job is the harder of the two. It is also the more important, because it is the key to making sure that the research you do actually makes your clients smarter and gets used.
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Researchers and Creatives: A Meeting of the Minds?
Admap, Charle E. Young
June 2005
Yes, you really can have a successful research meeting with the ad team!
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"Roughing It" Rehearse Your Creative Ideas in Rough Production to Optimize Ad Effectiveness
Marketing Research Magazine, Charles E. Young, Tony Dubitsky and John Kastenholz
Winter 2004
Results from advertising pre-testing research described here show that initially ?rehearsing? your executions in rough form can enhance the breakthrough and branding power of your finished film ads, if attention is paid to diagnostic insights provided by the pre-test. Several case studies are also included that demonstrate how insights from "rough rehearsals" were used to enhance animatics that were subsequently produced as film commercials.
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Semantic Networks: How to construct unique selling propositions for your brand's advertising
Charles E. Young
Persuasion is a about making new connections in the mind of the consumer. This paper describes a new tool for identifying the selling paths in the mind of the consumer that can be used to construct Unique Selling Propositions for your brand.
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A Short History of Television Copytesting
Charles. E. Young
This paper traces the evolution of the copy testing industry in the US from the late 1950s onward to the present time by exploring four key themes: the quest for evaluative "report card" measures, the development of diagnostic measures, the development of nonverbal measures, and the development of moment-by-moment measures. In closing, seven trends are described that will shape the future of the copy testing industry: the emergence of global research standards, the need for accountability, the move to online testing, the need for filtering plus optimization, a renewed emphasis on nonverbal measurement, the creation of new heuristic models to deal with media fragmentation, and, finally, the use of new mathematical approaches to model advertising effects.
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Single-Number Decision Making
White Paper, Charle E. Young
Ameritest point of view is that advertising research should be used as a learning system, not just a report card, and as part of a business process of continuous quality improvement.
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Tags Are It: Four Types of Branding Moments
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charle E. Young
April 2007
This paper introduces three types of memory systems: Action, Emotion and Knowledge. Different images from an ad go into these three memory systems combined with a fourth, Brand Identity, to make up a set of brand "tags" that can be applied as we examine how advertising creates meaning and memory in the mind of the consumer.
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Test Drive A Car Catalog-Emotion in Motion
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charle E. Young
October 2008
This paper shows how the Picture Sorts® Technique can be used to measure how consumers search through the visuals in a catalog. Each image is measured in terms of its attention-getting power and emotional impact. We then classify visuals into one of four categories based on the point of view represented by the photograph-e.g. the driver's experience versus the passenger experience--and analyze the emotional contribution each type of imagery makes to the overall brand image.
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Theater of the Mind
Admap, Charles E. Young
March 2009
The best metaphor for illustrating the role of a brand is to think about brands in terms of the theater of the mind. The theater is a particularly useful framework for having a productive conversation with a creative director. To apply the theater of the mind metaphor of the brand to the development of brand building advertising, you should ask three simple questions: What are the Rewards of the Product? What is the Role of the Brand Persona? What are the Rules (and boundaries) of the Brand Place?
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This is Your Brain on Advertising
Charles E. Young & Dr. Stephen Sands
Currently there is a great deal of interest among advertisers in new biometric research techniques that have been developed to deepen our understanding of how TV commercials really work. Our view is that useful knowledge in advertising science will come about as a result of building bridges between established ad research methods and the new findings of neuroscience.

In the spirit of building bridges to new knowledge, we teamed up to do an R&D experiment with Sands Research, a cutting-edge brain scan company run by Dr. Stephen Sands of the University of Texas at El Paso. Our goal was to learn from each other by comparing research results on some ads from our two points-of-view: one, a measurement system based on internet self-report, picture-sorting data and the other based on EEG brain wave measurement of ad effectiveness. This paper outlines what we learned from this experiment.
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The Time Shifter's Mind
White Paper, Charle E. Young
Time flies when you're having fun. This familiar concept, interestingly, applies to advertising as well as to life experiences. This paper explores the idea of subjective time and how it applies to advertising film. It will also present some new tools for creating fully integrated, fast-working ad campaigns.
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Through the Eyes of Children
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
Advertising that is targeted to young children must necessarily communicate most of its messaging with visuals, not words. This paper shows how picture sorts can be used to measure quantitatively how children as young as seven years old process the visuals in television commercials. Interestingly, the paper also shows how the findings for children in the U.S. has been replicated in a variety of other countries--which helps validate the universal language of storytelling in pictures.
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TV Pre-Testing Brochure
The Total Television Research Experience. Ameritest TV Brochure.
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The use of negative emotions in advertising
Admap, Charles E. Young
October, 2006
Negative emotions can have a powerful effect on attention, brand linkage and motivation. Many advertisers don't take this risk, limiting their options. The full spectrum of emotions can be employed to competitive advantage. Learn how to use negative emotions to drive advertising impact and avoid unintended negative emotion.
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Video Rhythms and Recall
Journal of Advertising Research, Charles E. Young and Michael Robinson
June/July 1989, Vol. 29, No. 3
In this article the authors present a view of television advertising that analyzes commercial content in terms of the rhythmic structure of video. The Picture Sorts technique provides us with an operational tool for tracking how consumers follow the frame-by-frame flow of commercial images.
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Virtual Consumption
Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Charles E. Young
April, 2005, Volume XIX Number 4
This paper explores the role of "false memories" and the "mental rehearsal of the consumption process" as one of the mechanisms by which advertising builds brands in the food and beverage categories.
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Virtual Store Checks
Admap, Charles E. Young
Though most advertising research would make you think otherwise, not all advertising in the world is conveyed through screens of information, such as television screens or computer screens. One of the most important counter-examples of the screen-based paradigm of advertising is in-store communication. This paper shows how the picture sort technique can be extended to the measurement of consumer attention and emotional response to communications in our physical, 3-D world.
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Visual Connectedness and Persuasion
Journal of Advertising Research, Charles E. Young, Michael Robinson
March/April 1992 Vol. 32, No. 2
This article shows how the Ameritest Picture Sorts technique explores the differences between persuasive and non-persuasive TV commercials.
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Visual Experience of New and Established Product Commercials
Charles E. Young and Michael Robinson
This study uses a moment-by-moment copytesting technique to examine the differences between new product and established brand TV commercials from an information theory perspective.
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What is the "Information" in an Ad?
Admap, Charles E. Young
November 2007
Each of our five senses contains information that cannot be translated into the other four senses. The language of advertising film conveys emotional truth to our eyes that our ears cannot completely understand. Pictures are not the same as words. To create effective advertising we need both.
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Why TV Spot Length Matters
Admap, Charle E. Young
September 2008
This paper explores the issue of how TV advertising performance varies as a function of the length of the ad. The paper also discusses a theoretical argument for why longer might be better, based on the different kinds of emotion-charged brand imagery from commercials that are stored in different memory systems of the mind than those accessed by traditional recall methods.
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